Best-before vs use-by: what the date really means

Have you ever stood in front of the fridge, squinting at a date on a package, wondering "is this still okay to eat?" That hesitation is one of the biggest drivers of household food waste. The good news: a little knowledge prevents most of it.

The short answer

They are two different promises. A use-by date is a safety limit and applies to perishables like raw meat, chicken and fish. A best-before date is a quality guide — food past it is usually still safe, just no longer at its best. A third label, sell-by, is a stock-rotation note for the shop and says nothing to you at all.

Use-by and best-before are different

Packaged food carries two very different kinds of date:

Use-by date: A safety date. After it passes, the product should not be eaten. You'll find it on perishable, microbiologically risky items: raw chicken, minced meat, fresh fish, some dairy.
Best-before date: A quality date, not a safety one. After it passes, the product is usually still safe to eat — it may just lose a bit of freshness, texture or aroma. You'll find it on long-life items: pasta, rice, biscuits, canned goods, spices.

Not knowing this difference is exactly what sends a perfectly good jar of jam or bag of pasta into the bin.

Which product falls into which group?

A rough map:

Product	Usually	After the date
Raw meat, chicken, fish	Use-by	Discard
Fresh milk, opened yogurt	Near use-by	Check smell/look
Eggs	Best-before	Do the float test
Canned goods, dry legumes	Best-before	Often still fine
Spices, honey, vinegar	Best-before	Last a long time

The rule: use-by is safety, best-before is quality. Respect use-by; trust your senses on best-before.

"Sell-by" is a message to the shop, not to you

If you see a sell-by date, it isn't addressed to you at all. The USDA describes it as a date that tells the store how long to display the product for sale — it's inventory management, not a safety instruction. Milk bought on its sell-by date still has days of normal fridge life ahead of it. Throwing food out because a sell-by date passed is throwing out food over a stock-rotation note.

The wording changes from country to country

The concept is the same everywhere; the phrasing isn't. This matters if you read labels in more than one language, or buy imported goods.

Where	Safety date	Quality date
UK / EU	Use by	Best before
United States	Use-By (see note)	Best if Used By
Türkiye	Son Tüketim Tarihi (STT)	Tavsiye Edilen Tüketim Tarihi (TETT)

Two things worth knowing:

In the United States, date labelling is mostly voluntary. With one exception, federal law doesn't require these dates at all, and the USDA states that they are not an indicator of safety. The exception is infant formula, where the use-by date is regulated and is a hard limit. Never feed formula past its date.
In Türkiye the two terms are legally distinct. Under the Turkish Food Codex labelling regulation, selling a product past its STT is prohibited, while a product past its TETT may still be sold provided it shows no deterioration in taste, smell or appearance.

So "the date on the pack" can mean a legal safety boundary or a manufacturer's freshness opinion, depending on which word precedes it and which country printed it.

Every date assumes two things

A printed date is a promise conditional on two assumptions, and both are easy to break at home:

The package is unopened. The date is calculated for a sealed product. The moment you open it, air and bacteria get in and a completely different clock starts — usually days, not weeks, regardless of what the pack says.
You stored it as instructed. A fridge running at 8°C instead of 4°C shortens shelf life dramatically. Bacteria multiply fastest between roughly 4°C and 60°C — the "danger zone" — where their numbers can double in as little as 20 minutes. A date printed for a 4°C fridge means very little in a warm one.

There's a third, happier case: freezing effectively pauses the clock. Food kept solidly frozen stays safe indefinitely; freezer times you see quoted are about quality — texture, flavour, freezer burn — not safety.

Don't forget your senses

A date is a guide, not an absolute verdict. For a best-before item that's passed, look, smell, and if needed taste a tiny amount. Mould, sourness, an off smell or a swollen package means the bin. Otherwise, it's most likely dinner. For a food-by-food breakdown of what's safe after the date, see our is food safe after expiry guide.

Two cautions on sensory checks, though. First, they work for quality, not for every safety risk: the bacteria that cause foodborne illness often leave no smell, taste or visible change at all. That's precisely why a use-by date is a hard stop — your senses cannot detect what it's protecting you from. Second, a swollen, leaking or rusted can goes in the bin unopened, however fine it looks; bulging means gas produced by microbial growth inside.

Eggs are the classic case where a simple test tells you more than the printed date. Put the egg in a glass of water: if it lies flat on the bottom it's fresh; if it stands on one end it's older; if it floats, its air cell has grown large enough to make it buoyant.

One nuance that most versions of this tip get wrong: floating means poor quality, not automatically unsafe. The USDA's guidance is to crack a floating egg into a bowl and judge it there — an off odour or unusual appearance means discard, otherwise it may be perfectly fine to cook. The float test dates the egg; your nose decides its fate.

When the date is not yours to judge

The sensory approach assumes a healthy adult eating ordinary food. Some situations remove that margin entirely, and in them you should follow the printed date strictly rather than your nose:

Pregnancy, infancy and early childhood
Weakened immunity — chemotherapy, immunosuppressant medication, some chronic conditions
Older adults, whose infection thresholds are lower

For these groups, follow the use-by date to the letter and skip the "it smells fine" reasoning altogether. If you're unsure, your doctor's advice comes first — ours is general household guidance, as our editorial policy sets out.

How long something lasts also depends on how you store it — the same yogurt keeps longer on an inner shelf than in the door. See our fridge shelf-life chart for the details. And once you've opened a package, the printed date no longer applies: how long opened products last covers that.

freshIt remembers the decision for you

Keeping every product's date in your head is hard. freshIt reads your grocery receipt, assigns each item an estimated expiry date based on its category, and nudges you gently a few days before it spoils. So you never reach the "is this still okay?" moment — because you'll have used it while it was fresh.

The first step to cutting waste is reading dates correctly. The second is never missing them.